Homing to the Given

I am moving into old time.
Fire embraces my shadow,
absorbs darkness into heat.

Friends linger, huddle under
our circular warmth. Ten thou -
sand years melt away in current
climate shift. There goes snow.

Too late for consolation, too late
to rewind the trend toward entropy.
Decades, centuries speed past
future possibles into the past as
currencies of passable presents.
How to turn this tendency around.

Rapidly, rapidly. Restraint is not
enough. Constraint does not serve.
That’s not the story. I’m drifting.
The ceremony commenced while
attention was off in is own helium.
I am standing before the entrance
of deep cave, a cave I recognize
only by the dark its shadow casts.

Fire gleams. Fire climbs the walls.
Shapes dance into consistent form.
Some felt sense emerges in over three
dimensions. Though there’s no one there
this shape becomes my own now, becomes
my contour – a new comfort great enough
to roam back, large enough to call home.


- Penn Kemp -